"It's part of the connection." Her throat was dry, but she couldn't lift her glass to drink. "You were meant to have it."
"That may be true. I've come to believe it's true. But that's not the point I'm making. I had to have the painting because I had to be able to look at that face. Your face. I knew every angle of it. The shape of the eyes, the mouth. I spent a lot of time studying that face. Then you walked into the room that day, and I was staggered. She woke up, and she walked out of the painting, and there she is."
"But it isn't me in the painting."
"Ssh. I couldn't think. For a minute I couldn't hear anything but my own heart beating. While I was trying to think, while I was trying not to grab you just to convince myself that you weren't going to vanish like smoke, everyone was talking. I had to speak to you, to pretend everything was normal when the world had done a very fast one-eighty on me. You can't imagine what was going on inside me."
"No. I guess—no," she managed.
"You said you had to get home for your son, and you might as well have stabbed me in the throat. How could she belong to someone else before I get a chance? So I looked down, saw you weren't wearing a ring, and I thought, Thank God, she doesn't belong to someone else."
"But you didn't even know me."
"I do now." He leaned in, took her lips with his.
"Man. Are you going to do that all the time now?"
Brad eased back, brushed a kiss against Zoe's forehead, then turned to Simon. "Yes. But I don't want you to feel left out, so I'll kiss you, too."
Simon made spitting noises and danced to safety behind his mother's stool. "Kiss her if you've got to kiss somebody. Are we going to eat soon? I'm starving."
"Big fat steaks about to go on the fire. So, kid, how do you like your frog?"
AFTER dinner, and the video rematch, after Simon's eyes drooped shut as he sprawled on the game room floor, Zoe let herself slide into Brad's arms. Let herself float into the kiss.
There was magic in the world, she thought. And this night had been some of hers.
"I have to take Simon home."
"Stay." He rubbed his cheek against hers. "Just stay, both of you."
"That's a big step for me." She rested her head on his shoulder. It would be so easy, she knew, to stay. To just let herself be held this way. But big steps should never be easy.
"I'm not playing games with you, but I have to think about what's right." For all of us, she thought. "I meant what I said about wondering how I've ended up here. I have to be sure about whatever happens next."
"I'm not going to hurt you. I'm not going to hurt either of us."
"I'm not afraid of that. No, that's a lie. I am. But I'm afraid I could hurt you. I didn't tell you what happened last night. I didn't want to talk about it in front of Simon."
"What is it?"
"Can we go in the other room? In case he wakes up." "It was Kane," Brad said as he walked her into the great room.
"Yes." And she told him.
"Is that what you wanted, Zoe? To live in New York, work in a high-powered job?"
"Oh, I don't know about New York. Could just as easily have been Chicago, or Los Angeles, anyplace that seemed important. Anyplace that wasn't where I was."
"Because you were unhappy, or because there were things you wanted to do?"
She started to answer, then stopped. "Both," she realized. "I don't know that I thought about being unhappy, but I guess I was a lot of the time. The world just seemed so small and set where I lived. The way I lived."
She looked out the windows, across the lawn to the dark ribbon of river. "But the world isn't small, and it's not set. I used to think about that, to wonder about all that. The people and the places out there."
Surprised at herself, she turned back to see him watching her, quiet and steady. "Anyway, that's off the track."
"I don't think so. What made you happy?"
"Oh, lots of things. I don't mean to sound like I was sad all the time. I wasn't. I liked school. I was good in school. I liked learning things, figuring things out. I was especially good with numbers. I did Mama's books and her taxes. I took care of the bills. I liked doing it. I thought maybe I'd be a bookkeeper, or even a CPA. Or work in banking. I wanted to go to college, and get an important job, move to the city. Have things. Have more, that's all. Have people respect me, even admire me, because I knew how to do things."
She gave a little shrug, wandered to the fireplace. "Used to irritate my mama, the way I talked about it, and how I was fussy about what belonged to me because I wanted to keep it nice. She said how I thought I was better than anybody else, but that wasn't it."
Her brows drew together as she stared at the flames. "That wasn't it at all. I just wanted to be better than I was. I figured if I was smart enough, I could get that good job and move to the city, and nobody'd look at me and think, There's that trailer trash from over in the hollow."
"Zoe."
She shook her head. "People did think that, Bradley. They did because it was true enough. My daddy drank too much and ran off with another woman, left my mother with four children, a stack of bills, and a double-wide. Most of my clothes were what somebody'd given us out of charity. You don't know what that's like."
"No, I don't. I don't know what it's like."
"Some people give you things out of goodness, but a lot of them do it so they can feel superior. So they can sit smug and say, Look what I did for that poor woman and her children. And you see it on their faces."
She glanced over at him, her cheeks flushed with the heat of both pride and shame. "It's hateful. I didn't want anybody giving me anything. I wanted to get it for myself. So I worked, and I squirreled money away, and I made big plans. Then I got pregnant."
She looked back toward the archway to make certain Simon was still out of earshot. "Didn't realize I was until I was into my second month. Thought I had the flu or something. But it didn't go away, so I went to the clinic and they told me. I was about nine weeks already. God, nine weeks along, and too stupid to know it."
"You were a child." And one he ached for. "You weren't stupid, you were a child."
"Old enough to get pregnant. Old enough to know what that meant. I was so scared. I didn't know what was going to happen. I didn't tell my mother, not right away. I went to the boy. He was scared, too, and maybe he was a little angry. But he said we'd do the right thing. I felt better after that. I felt calmer. So I went home and told Mama."
She drew a deep breath, pressed her fingers to her temples. She hadn't meant to speak of all of this, but now that she'd begun, she would finish. "Oh, I can still see her, sitting there at the table with the fan blowing. It was hot, awfully damn hot. She looked at me, and leaned over and slapped me.
"I don't blame her for that," she said when Brad swore. "I didn't blame her then, I don't blame her now. I'd been sneaking out behind her back to be with that boy, and now I had to pay the price for it. I don't blame her for the slap, Bradley, I had it coming. But I blame her for after. For finding satisfaction in knowing I'd gotten in trouble, the same as she had with me. For making sure I knew I was no better than she was, for all my ideas and plans. I blame her for making me feel cheap, and making the baby I was carrying into a punishment."
"She was wrong." It was said simply, in a matter-of-fact tone that had Zoe's breath hitching. "What happened with the father?"
"Well, he didn't do the right thing, as he'd called it. I don't want to talk about that right now. There's this business in my clue about forks on the path. I chose my direction back then. I quit school, and I went to work. I got my GED and my beautician's license, and I left home."
"Wait." He held up a hand. "You went out on your own, alone, when you were sixteen? And pregnant. Your mother—"
"Didn't have any say in it," she interrupted. She turned, facing him with the fire snapping behind her. "I left when I was six months gone because I was not going to raise my baby in that goddamn trailer. I took my direction," she said, "and maybe that path started me on the road to the Valley, and the Peak, and all of this."